Tools I Actually Use

toolslinuxinfrastructure

Every “tools I use” post is secretly a recommendation list in disguise. This isn’t that. This is an inventory — what’s actually on my machines, what I reach for daily, and what I installed once with good intentions and haven’t touched since.

The infrastructure stack

I manage IT for a handful of small professional offices. The toolkit for that work is boring and battle-tested:

  • SonicWall — Firewalls across all client sites. I’ve used enough firewall platforms over the years to know that the best one is the one you understand completely, not the one with the most features. SonicWall gets the job done.
  • ConnectWise ScreenConnect — Remote access. This is the tool I probably use most frequently in a given day. Quick remote sessions to troubleshoot, deploy, check on things.
  • 3CX — Phone system management. Not exciting, but it’s the phone platform across the offices I manage.
  • M365 Admin — Multiple tenants. Exchange, Azure AD, the usual. I spend more time in M365 admin portals than I’d like to admit.
  • Azure — Monitoring, alerts, a few cloud resources. The alerting is genuinely useful. The portal UI is genuinely not.

The terminal

Ubuntu Desktop with bash. VS Code and Cursor for anything more than a quick edit, the default terminal for everything else. No tmux, no multiplexer — just tabs and windows. PowerShell on the Windows machines I still touch for client work.

I know the tmux crowd would be horrified. It’s fine. I’ve tried it. The overhead of managing sessions wasn’t worth it for how I work. I’d rather have four terminal tabs visible at once than one multiplexed session I have to navigate with keybindings. If that changes, I’ll know.

The one thing I’ll say about terminal setup: if you spend hours a day in a terminal and you haven’t invested a few hours in making it comfortable, you’re leaving quality of life on the table. Even if “comfortable” just means decent font size and a color scheme that doesn’t burn your eyes at midnight.

AI tools

This is the newer layer and it’s evolving fast:

  • Claude — My primary AI. I use it through the API (powering Triss, my AI assistant on OpenClaw), through claude.ai for interactive work, and through Claude Code for terminal-based coding tasks. If I had to pick one AI tool, this is it.
  • Cursor — AI-augmented code editor. Good for when I’m writing something more substantial than a quick script. The inline completions are genuinely useful, not just autocomplete-with-extra-steps.
  • Claude Code — CLI-based coding assistant. I reach for this when I’m already in the terminal and don’t want to context-switch to an editor. Good for “write me a script that does X” workflows.
  • OpenClaw — The platform Triss runs on. Not an AI tool exactly — more like the operating system for an AI assistant. Manages the agent, cron jobs, tools, and workspace.

What’s gathering dust

Every setup has a graveyard. Tools you installed with good intentions, configured once, maybe used twice.

I won’t list everything, but I’ll say this: the pattern is always the same. You hear about a tool, it sounds like it solves a problem, you spend an evening setting it up, and then you realize the problem it solves isn’t actually the problem you have. Or the problem is real but the tool adds more friction than it removes. The tools that survive are the ones that disappear into the workflow. If you have to remember to use it, it won’t last.

The pattern

Looking at this list, there’s a clear split: the MSP tools are stable and slow-moving. I’ve used SonicWall and ScreenConnect for years. They work, I know them deeply, and switching would cost more in retraining than it would save in features.

The AI tools are the opposite — fast-moving, still settling, being evaluated constantly. Six months ago I wasn’t using Claude Code. Three months ago I wasn’t running an AI assistant on a cron schedule. The infrastructure side of my work changes on a scale of years. The AI side changes on a scale of weeks.

Both matter. The infrastructure experience is what keeps the AI work grounded, and the AI tools are what make the infrastructure work less tedious.